I would again assert my strong belief that in the religious conception of a people we find the true thoughts and the customs of the period in which they originated. A patriarchal people could not have given expression to a creation myth in which the female idea prevailed, and the mother, and not the father, was dominant. For men have ever fashioned the gods in their own human image, endowing them with their thoughts and actions. The sharp change in the view of woman’s part in the relationship of the sexes is clearly symbolised in these creation myths. Yes, it marks the degradation of woman; she has fallen from the maternal conception of the feminine principle, guiding, directing, and using the male, to that of the woman made for the man in the patriarchal Bible story. Another group of legends that I would notice refer to the conflict between the right of the mother and that of the father in relation to the children. These stories belong to a period of transition. In ancient Greece, as we have seen, the paternal family succeeded the maternal clan. In his _Orestia_, Æschylus puts in opposition before Pallas Athene the right of the mother and the right of the father. The chorus of the Eumenides, representing the people, defends the position of the mother; Apollo pleads for the father, and ends by declaring, in a fit of patriarchal delirium, that _the child is not of the blood of the mother_. “It is not the mother who begets what is called her child; she is only the nurse of the germ poured into her womb; he who begets is the father. The woman receives the germ merely as guardian, and when it pleases the gods, she preserves it.” Plato also brings forward this view, and states that the mother contributes nothing to the child’s being. “The mother is to the child what the soil is to the plant; it owes its nourishment to her, but the essence and structure of its nature are derived from the father.” Again the Orestes of Euripides takes up the same theory, when he says to Tyndarus: “My father has begotten me, and thy daughter has given birth to me, as the earth receives the seed that another confides to it.” Here we trace a different world of thoughts and conceptions; the mother was so little esteemed as to be degraded into the mere nourisher of the child. These patriarchal theories naturally consecrated the slavery of woman.[232] [232] McLennan, _Studies_, “Kinship in Ancient Greece”; Letourneau, _Evolution of Marriage_, pp. 336-337, and Starcke, _The Primitive Family_, pp. 115-116.